Twenty-one and a half seconds. That was the winning time in the 100 metres at Beijing’s first World Humanoid Robot Games last year. On Tuesday, at the second edition of the event, a robot called Tiangong Ultra covered the same distance in 8.86 seconds. No human being has ever run it that fast. Usain Bolt’s world record, set in 2009 and untouched since, stands at 9.58.
From shuffle to sprint in twelve months
Tiangong Ultra, developed by the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, set the new mark in the semifinal of the large-size robot division, lowering the 9.39 seconds it had clocked at the event’s opening ceremony. The trajectory is the remarkable part. Last year the same robot line won the inaugural 100 metres in 21.50 seconds, months after winning the world’s first humanoid half-marathon in Beijing at an amateur-jogger pace of 2 hours 40 minutes. Twelve months later it is running sprint times that would win any Olympic final by daylight.
It was not even the only machine under Bolt’s record. On the opening Saturday, Tiangong fell behind early before overtaking Lightning, a robot built by smartphone maker Honor, near the line. Lightning finished in 9.47 seconds, and Honor says it has recorded 9.32 in a test run.
According to the innovation centre, its Tiangong robots have now bettered four human world records: the 100 metres, a 400-metre time of 38.15 seconds, a 1,500-metre mark of 2 minutes 21.64 seconds, and a 2.88-metre high jump. For context, the human high jump record has stood at 2.45 metres since 1993.
Fires, falls and a robot in pieces
The spectacle came with reminders of how experimental this hardware still is. Tiangong Ultra ended its record run by slamming into a thick mat placed beyond the finish line to stop the sprinting machines, and after it collapsed from the impact a small fire appeared in its torso. In the other semifinal, a competing robot came apart mid-race, shedding components on the track.
That contrast is the honest picture of humanoid robotics in 2026. Locomotion control has improved at a pace that surprises even people in the field, while reliability, thermal management and durability lag well behind. A machine that outruns every human in history and then catches fire at the finish line is both achievements and warning in one frame.
“Reading that a motor-powered robot can run faster than a human is one thing,” Li Hui, a 26-year-old engineer with Fudan University’s table-tennis robot team, told Reuters at the games. “Seeing it rush past you during training is completely different. You realise how impressive it is.”
A benchmark dressed as a sports event
The games themselves have scaled with the technology. More than 2,000 robots from 666 teams are competing across 51 events at the National Speed Skating Oval, from football and dancing to industrial-task contests that look a lot more like job interviews than sport. That last category is the point. China has designated humanoid robots a strategic emerging industry, and the games function as a public benchmark for progress in motors, sensors and the AI controlling them.
The money behind the winner tells the same story. The Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center counts state-owned enterprises, several investment funds, AI and cloud giant Baidu, and the robotics unit of Xiaomi among its shareholders, according to Chinese corporate data provider Qichacha. Sprint times make headlines, but the commercial target is manufacturing, logistics and services, where a robot that can move quickly and recover from disturbance is worth far more than one that can medal.
The number to watch is not 8.86. It is whatever the same platform runs next year, and whether the balance and recovery software that keeps a robot upright at full sprint starts showing up in warehouses before then. For more coverage of robotics and AI, visit Mylistingo.
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